The Art of Escaping
by frombluetored
Summary: "I don't like myself either." I tell her. She turns her face from me. "Good."


** A/n:** I know, I know, there's another story I'm supposed to be updating. But I have hit quite a brick wall and decided to post this while I'm working through it. I wanted to examine a slightly different side to Annie and Finnick and their story. I'm not quite sure how I feel about it yet, but it was fun to write despite! Hope you like :)

* * *

The first time I see her, she's got a stony smile and empty eyes.

Her family cries when she walks onto stage.

She laughs in my face when I ask her if she's okay. The sound is erratic, false, and just a little bit broken. But the way her eyes dig into me make it certain that I'm not supposed to mention that at all.

She resists my training, resists my advice, claims this is what she wanted and she knows what she's going to do. She is bothered by my presence and this only makes me crave hers more. The closer I get to her the further she leans back. By the third night I am thirsting for her. But not for her body, but for her mind, her heart, for her understanding. This knowledge terrifies me because I don't know how to be on the other side. I don't know how to be the one who gets sent away. I don't want to be. She stands beside me and stares blankly forward, without quivering, and I want to know where the strength comes from. She effortlessly and wordlessly slides from my grasp when I stroke a hand down her back, not knowing or caring that most women give annual salaries for that touch, for that attention. I ask her about herself and she tells me she's an escape artist. I ask her about her childhood and she tells me she didn't have one.

It isn't until that night that it occurs to me that maybe she wasn't dismissing me with those answers. Maybe that is the truth.

* * *

My escape artist won't be my anything.

I call her my tribute and she shrugs my arm off her shoulders. "_I'm the Capitol's tribute,"_ she tells me coldly, and even though it's true I can't help but wonder why she'd choose them over me.

Mags forms a relationship with her that I envy. They laugh together and confide in each other and I watch them with an aching heart. I watch her walk off to bed, her hair swinging behind her, and for a moment I think to myself: is this what my lovers feel like when I walk away from them?

* * *

I slip into her room the night before training starts and find her crying in the middle of the bed. I wait for her anger, her repulsion, but she doesn't yell at me. She extends one small hand out across the sheets, and just like that, I am certain someone has dug a fishing hook into my heart. And they pull and pull and it hurts and hurts.

I sit on the edge and extend my hand, too. I grasp hers tightly. I want to hold it, just hold it, but then she's pulling it away again.

"Why do you do that?" I ask her, because I have to know. I wait for her to ask me what I'm referring to, but she doesn't. She keeps her wide green eyes on me, and I get this feeling that she is pulling me apart.

She hugs her legs to her chest, her breaths shaky and her small nose red from crying.

"You remind me of me." She tells me, her voice thick. "And I don't want to be like you in the arena. I don't want to like you at all."

The words hurt so badly I want to hit her suddenly. I think she sees the urge in my eyes. But after a moment of looking at the red blotches across her cheek, I understand that I never could, never would.

"I don't like myself either." I tell her instead.

She turns her face from me.

"Good."

* * *

I'm in my room, dressing for the day, when she cracks the door open and slips in.

She's still in a nightgown, her hair tangled and her face pink from sleeping, and something tugs me near her. I rise to my feet and she stands at the door, her hands gripping the bottom of her nightgown nervously.

"I don't think I can do it." She says, and I think to myself that it's the most vulnerable thing I've heard her say to me. I know she's thinking of the arena, of digging knives into the flesh of other children.

"No one can do it." I respond. I run a hand through my hair, feeling inexplicably sad. "And yet they do."

She takes a step towards me, her eyes curious for the first time since I've met her.

"Do you feel bad about it? Killing those children?"

The words come with no hesitation.

"No."

Her face shows no shock.

"They were going to kill me." I explain. "I'm sorry to have been in a situation where I had to. But I'm not sorry that I did."

She stares at me, her eyes growing hard.

"You're a liar."

I want to tell her that she is right just as she is wrong. I am not haunted by the deaths I've caused. I am haunted by the life that I now live because of it. I am sorry that I did only because I wish I would have died. When she takes another step closer, I find the strength to say this, even though I don't know why.

"I wish it was me who died."

Her eyes drift shut momentarily, like she's just experienced a wave of pain. When they flicker back open, she looks unbelievably old.

"That's what I was afraid of."

* * *

I slip back into the Training Center at three AM, freshly showered and visibly shaken.

No one was supposed to be awake, but then again, I wasn't supposed to be living like this either.

She's got those curious eyes on again and I want to run from her. I want to run from her this time and see if she would chase me. I stand in the doorway and she doesn't move from her seat on the couch and we just stare at each other for a moment.

"Do you fuck them or make love to them?"

The word is shocking as it comes out from between her soft lips. I am still no closer to understanding this girl, but I want to. I'm shaken from my clients and deeply ashamed, and yet I want to pull her as close as she can get and whisper questions into her ear until she answers me. I want her to give me secrets like all the rest do, their hair damp and eyes dewy. But I want her to give them to me because she wants to.

"What do you think?" I finally answer.

She toys with the bottom of her pony tail, her eyes on me. The only light in the room comes from the bright Capitol city lights shining in from the window. They leave long shadows on her face.

"I think you make hate." She finally says.

I have no idea what she's talking about. I escape to take a shower almost immediately. But the next time I'm with someone, I fall against their sweat soaked blankets, filled to the brim with a self-hatred that makes me want to rip the sheets apart with my bare hands and hang myself with the strips from the golden ceiling fan, and it hits me. Oh.

* * *

She seeks me out in my room again. I am sitting on the edge of the bed, unbelievably tired. There is no exhaustion like the exhaustion you feel when you are so trapped you don't even have the freedom to die.

I am surprised when she sits down beside me on the bed, so close that her thigh presses against mine.

"You're a different person when you're in public." She acknowledges.

"Everyone is."

"No. Other people show different parts of themselves at different levels depending on who they're with. You change completely."

I turn slightly to my left so I'm facing her more. This time, she leans closer.

"Who are you, Annie?" I ask her, pleading in my tone to understand. "Are you sweet like you are with Mags? Are you gentle like you were during your interviews? Are you ruthless like you act around me? Are you scared? Do you cry at night? What will you miss the most about life?"

I expect her to move away, but she doesn't. She leans closer to me. She sets her hands on my thighs. It makes me feel warm.

"I like apples in my oatmeal." She finally tells me.

I glance down at her hands on my legs and then back at her face.

"I wish you'd let me know you." I say.

She raises one eyebrow.

"Why?" She challenges.

I panic when I realize I can't answer that.

* * *

The night before the morning she's to head into the arena, she falls into my bed.

The smell of apples warms my nose and then she's setting a hand on my shoulder. I sit up in the bed, fumble with the lamp on the beside table for a moment, and then look at her. She's in a lavender bathrobe, her hair wet from a recent shower.

"Are you okay?" I ask her.

Her eyes are softer than I've ever seen. I think to myself that it just looks right, and then she's leaning into me, her arms wrapping around my middle.

"Stop asking me that." She demands.

Her lips press to my neck and I stop functioning. I freeze and pull back from her moments later, confused.

She looks so small. She's sitting with her legs folded underneath her, her wet hair darkening the fabric of the bathrobe. Her eyes are wide and vulnerable and her robe has slipped open a bit, revealing a good amount of her chest. I want to tell her she's beautiful, and it's then that I understand that that's the word I've been trying to pin to her all along. Annie Cresta is beautiful. It's as simple and as complex as that.

"Do you only know how to make hate, Finnick?" She asks me, and it's the first time she refers to me by my name. Her voice sounds so young, so timid, and yet there's a confidence and determination in her eyes. For a woman of eighteen, she is both ancient and childlike simultaneously.

I almost tell her the truth. That I could never imagine touching her the ways I touch the women and men I sleep with. That I could never hold her while hating anything at all, because I would be afraid that hatred would sink into her.

She doesn't seem bothered that I don't answer. She leans forward again and presses her forehead against my shoulder. I lift my hand automatically and rest it on the back of her head.

"Give me something good while there's still something good to get." She says.

I should feel angry and used at these words, but I can't register anything but a deep and hidden longing. I lower my hand from her hair and trace her spine instead.

"Why should I?" I ask.

She runs her nose along my neck, slides a hand up the back of my shirt.

"Because you want to. Because you should have what you want. Because I should have what I want, too." She murmurs.

Something about those words gets to me, emotionally and physically and mentally. The evidence of the truth of that statement is evident in everything that I am in that moment. I hold her to me and try to ignore the tugging of that hook in my heart.

"I thought you hated me?" I ask. And yet I'm sticking my hand underneath her robe and stroking her smooth skin, because maybe she's right. Maybe I deserve to have what I want this one time. Maybe I could give myself one instance of pleasure, one night of freedom. But it would only feel like freedom if it was what she wanted, too.

"No." She says, and that statement has me gripping her closer. "I hate the way I am drawn to you. I hate the possibility of weakness that you bring forth. I hate the fact that I can't hate you." She pauses for a moment and then continues, her voice oddly soft. "I hate the idea of anyone caring about me because I don't feel I deserve that at all."

And it's the first time I have ever felt like someone has spoken words pulled straight from my own heart.

"Let's pretend we deserve it tonight." She whispers, and that's all it really takes. I touch her like I can tell her that I think she's amazing. I touch her like she can understand through the touches that she is the only one I have ever wanted to consume. And her fingertips tell a similar story as they trace my skin. When I lean up to kiss her, she pulls back.

"Don't kiss me." She tells me, and I want to cry. "I don't want to be kissed."

I don't understand it, and maybe I never will, but she pulls my pants down and pushes me back on the bed. When I push into her, she makes me a promise.

"I don't love you." She says, almost like she's reminding someone.

It's startlingly easy to reply. I stroke her hair back from her face with fond fingertips and try to find a way to express how wonderful I think she is from each of my movements.

"I don't love you, either." I say.

But that doesn't explain why, later that night after she's gone, I feel like that's the first time I have ever made love to anyone.

* * *

In the morning, she finds me again. She clings tightly to my hand, weaving her fingers between mine like stitches joining together a wound. I have never held hands before.

"I don't think I'm okay, after all." She tells me.

My throat burns as I reply.

"I'm not either."

* * *

She is all of the things I thought she'd be and more in the arena.

She kills with blank eyes and cries later that night when it's safe and she's alone. She turns on the tributes from Two when they start acting suspicious and scrubs the blood off her skin so hard her own blood takes its place once they're taken care of. She is standoffish to her district partner but sometimes lies about how much she's eaten just so he can have more.

When District One captures her tribute, none of us expect it. Least of all Annie. And when the blade slices through his neck over and over again, and his head rolls across the ground to her feet, she only stares.

"You're next, Cresta." They say.

And she looks down at the head. And back up. And down at the head. And back up.

They stare in disbelief as she turns around and starts walking away calmly. When I look into her eyes, she is not there at all.

And, oddly, no one follows her. She has made them uneasy. She has made us all uneasy.

Once she's alone, she vomits until there is nothing left to vomit, and then she scratches at a tree with her thumbnail over and over again until her nail breaks halfway off. She curls up onto the ground, her arms around her legs, and screams her head off. She screams so loudly people in the Mentor Control Room mute their television. All except me, because I understand what she's yelling.

_I am no one!_

* * *

Later, when the cameras pan back to her, she's still huddled on the ground, her hands locked tightly over her ears.

All I can see are the words she's scratched into the tree.

_i lied_

* * *

It isn't until she loses her mind that I understand who she really is.

I'm there when they pull her from the arena, shaking and soaked. I'm there when she starts screaming, her eyes wide with terror and her entire body so tense she can't even stand. I'm there when they lock her away in a mental facility where they pump drug after drug into her body. I'm there when she speaks for the first time since coming out of the arena.

"I wasn't made for this." She whispers to me.

I punch the doctors when they tell me I can't get near her. I crawl into bed with her and hold her. I whisper into her ear that I lied, too. She doesn't know what the words mean and neither do I, but I know that I mean them.

* * *

Snow is furious because he can't sell a girl who isn't even here.

I grin on my ride over to the hospital.

I hold her in my arms again, not knowing why I do, not caring why I have to. Only caring that she lets me, that she smiles a small smile when she sees me, that I'm the one she asks the nurses for at night when she's sick and scared. (I don't tell her, but she is who I would ask for, too.)

"You're my escape artist," I tell her softly. I feel okay about saying it, because she has that faraway look in her eyes, and I'm sure she won't yell at me for it and correct me with words that hurt. Words like: _I'm the Capitol's escape artist_. It's just that I have belonged to the Capitol for so long. I don't want them owning anyone else. Especially not Annie, who turns out to be the kindest person alive once she's torn from her layers. And I feel okay about saying it now because I won't have to explain what I can't even explain to myself. That hearing that she won't be sold and defiled makes me feel as if I never have been either. That knowing that I was the last person to have her so close makes me relieved (because I know the last person who was with her cared about her).

But something about these words makes something click in her mind, and my escape artist returns to me. Her eyes are wet as she looks into mine.

"Escape with me." She whispers, and even though I can't make much sense of the words logically, they make sense in my heart.

"I will. But first stay where I can reach you."

And from that day on, she is always where I can reach her. She drifts, but when I speak to her or take her hand, her mind is grounded. She cries and screams when she has nightmares instead of shutting down for days at a time. She speaks sporadically to people other than me. And when they release her, they make her suffer through one Recap, and then she's on a train with me back to District 4 for good.

* * *

She flourishes in District 4 as time passes.

There is no family to meet her at the train station when we first arrive. I don't ask her, but somehow I know they have been gone a while. She doesn't look around for them, at least.

She grows underneath Mags' care. It occurs to me one night that I don't think of her as a broken version of her past self. I think of her as a more honest version of her real self. That fact worries me. I've known her for a year before I can admit to myself that I am falling in love with a mad girl who isn't really that mad at all.

And oh, do I learn. We sit in the warm sand together every morning, the breeze tousling our hair, and I tell her all about my childhood, my fears, my dreams. I tell her about crying the first night after I volunteered because I already realized I had made a fatal mistake. I tell her about losing my family. I can talk to her easier than I can talk to anyone, and I don't know why, but I think it has something to do with the fact that when I speak to her I feel as if I'm really speaking to myself, as if we are two of the same one. She listens attentively, smiling at me affectionately, and I stop worrying that she hates me. Maybe it's because she has nothing left to lose now, but there is no fear in the loving way she holds my hands sometimes. And when I tell her about what President Snow has been doing to me, she pulls me into her arms.

"I want to hurt anyone who hurts you." She admits, her voice breaking halfway through her statement.

I almost cry.

* * *

When she finally speaks, I almost gasp like her words are air I've been deprived of.

She tells me all I wanted to know and more. It seems that as each day passes her willingness to open up doubles. She tells me all about herself. She tells me she grew up with a sickly grandfather who couldn't take care of her. She tells me about the first job she got when she was only seven. She repaired nets for a fisherman each day after school for only barely enough to provide food for her and her grandfather three times a week. She weaves a story of a childhood spent at job after job after job, and she cries when she tells me about the day her grandfather passed away, despite it all. She was placed in a foster home that she hated, with foster parents who didn't pay attention to her. But her eyes light up when she tells me about the dog the family had. He was her best friend, she says, and she laughs after she says it. There is no sadness in her voice when she tells the story of that dog's life, because it had been so rich and beautiful.

I pull her into my lap and hold her tightly when she explains that she volunteered because she didn't know what else to do. She had wanted to make a better life for herself, a life full of freedom, freedom that she never had growing up. She cries into my shoulder as she realizes that life as a victor is more restricting than any other life.

And, on my own, I learn so many beautiful things about her. I learn that she has to sleep in socks or she wakes up shivering. I learn that she bites down on the straw before taking a sip of a drink. I learn that she's a terrible cook but a wonderful baker. I find out that she can list off every type of knot ever known off the top of her head. I fall in love with these little things, maybe more than I fell in love with anything else. I fall in love with the way she folds shirts and the nervous bouncing of her leg as she reads the morning paper. I fall in love with the way her small hands look as they twist her hair up into a bun in the summertime. I fall in love with her softness, her hardness, her weaknesses, her strengths. I fall in love with the fact that she is everything inside one body. I fall in love with the fact that there is no definition to her at all.

But, mostly, I fall in love with the fact that she could make me love anything at all in the first place.

* * *

She's present more than absent these days.

I'm at her house more than my own these days, too. I keep a toothbrush in her bathroom and a pair of pajamas in her drawer. We haven't slept together since the night before her Games. I still haven't kissed her. But somehow the whispered words we share are more intimate than any of those things could ever be.

We're lying in bed, listening to a storm rage on outside, when she turns over onto her side and faces me.

"I want to kiss you, but I'm afraid." She tells me, in a way that only Annie could. Her words are blunt but are cushioned somehow. They come out gentle and soft despite the honesty. The Games destroyed her walls, but they didn't destroy her.

"What are you afraid of?" I ask her. I have longed to kiss her for my entire life. I am somehow sure of this.

She jumps a bit at a particularly loud peal of thunder. I edge forward without even meaning to, protectiveness surging up inside of me.

"I'm afraid because once I kiss you, you will know." She murmurs. She glances down, frowning, and I reach for her hands automatically.

"Know what?" I press gently.

She keeps her face ducked.

"That I'm in love with you." She whispers.

Her words change my heart. There is a shift inside of me and suddenly everything is brighter, everything is beautiful. Why would she want to be with someone like me? I'm unsure. But I am so glad. Because I want to be with her, too. In any way that I can.

I lean forward and press my lips against hers, and I wordlessly tell her over and over that I'm in love with her too. I stroke my tongue against hers and grip her waist tightly, my heart too large for my chest and my eyes oddly burning. When I part from her, I press my forehead against hers and listen to her rapid breathing.

She understands the message.

"Why would you want to be with someone like me?" She finally asks me, her breath fanning out against my face. I lean in a kiss her once more.

"Because I think you're everything." I tell her. "Besides, why would you want to be with someone like me?"

Her answer comes easily to her.

"Because you make me better. Because you remind me that there can be overwhelming good inside of people who have done bad things. Because you smile at me every morning."

That night, I whisper those three words into her ear.

It is the first time I can remember ever saying them.

* * *

We become so intertwined that forget where she ends and where I begin.

We live together, eat together, sleep together, bathe together. I automatically make her a cup of coffee in the mornings and she turns down my side of the bed for me at night.

I make hate in the Capitol to nameless men and women and make love to her at home. They are two distinct things, different like black and white and light and dark and hot and cold. She gasps my name against my neck and I swear it is the most beautiful thing I have ever heard.

She lets me kiss her anytime, all the time, everywhere. I let myself love her. She lets herself love me.

I suppose I'm not surprised when the Quarter Quell is announced.

I hold her hair back as she vomits into the carpet.

That night, she curls up into herself and locks her hands over her ears and repeats that same phrase that always cuts me deep. _I am no one, I am no one, I am no one. _

I uncurl her and cradle her in my arms and press kisses to her face.

"You are mine, you are mine, you are mine. You are everything." I promise her.

It is only then that she lowers her hands.

* * *

Keeping the rebellion plan from her is difficult. Lying to her and telling her that I'm going to come home is harder.

She consumes me: mind, body, soul. Everything I do is for her. Every sacrifice I plan to make, every conversation I have, every step I take. Everything is to keep her safe. Because she is the only good thing left.

I don't ask Mags. But she does it anyway. She takes the place of the mad girl who isn't really mad at all. Just good at escaping.

I think it's the last time I will ever see her when she comes into the Justice Building to say goodbye, so I bury my hands into her hair and kiss her deeply.

"You are the thing I will miss most about living." I tell her.

Her back shakes as she sobs.

* * *

She is so very far from me. Her screams rip through me like barbed wire would, shredding my skin, tearing my heart. I am paralyzed by the realization that I have left her all alone in Four. I am paralyzed by the realization that Snow could have harmed her already, and that even if he hasn't yet, he will if this doesn't go according to plan.

I apologize more times than I can count that night once everyone is asleep.

* * *

I am no one.

That is all I can think in District Thirteen.

I cry all night and stare unseeingly all day. I see the most terrible things, I hear the most terrible sounds. I know what they are doing to her. It feels like they are doing it to me, too. I know it then. I know that we are two parts of the same person. I know that it's a tragedy that we were somehow pulled apart into different bodies, just as I know that it was a miracle that we were able to come back together.

I am not myself again until I hear her shriek my name. She runs into my arms, naked except for a wrinkled bedsheet, and nothing has ever meant more to me. Nothing has ever been so powerful.

"I'm sorry I went where you couldn't reach me." She tells me, her voice muffled against my gray uniform.

This makes me sob into her hair. The guilt eats me alive and I understand that I will never escape it. My beloved was tortured and it was all my fault. There is no evading that.

"Thank you for escaping." I whisper, hoping she understands just how much I mean that. Just how much I feel that. Just how much I depend on her, how I am not me without her by my side.

Her next words make me ache for days afterwards, because they are like acid into my guilt-inflicted wounds.

"Thank you for finding me."

* * *

It isn't until the night after our wedding that I understand her words. She grips me and tells me: _Without you, I wouldn't be myself at all. _

And because I understand, I give her her words back.

_Thank you for finding me._

* * *

She lies to me the night before I leave her for the very last time.

She kisses me like she has a secret, and when I ask her for it (like I'm so accustomed to doing), she denies its existence. Her lips tastes sad. Her eyes look sad. We are both so sad and there is nothing more to say.

I hold her close to me and cry with her. I lie to her. I tell her I'm going to be back, even though I somehow know that I won't.

We make love, and afterwards, with her bare body pressed flush against mine, I can feel her secret. I pull back and look down at her, scanning my eyes down her body until I notice a slight swell that I hadn't noticed before. Maybe I just wouldn't let myself see it because it hurt too badly.

"Annie," I plead, and then I'm crying so hard I can't catch my breath and she's stroking my hair back from my face, her fingertips shaking.

"I feel it now." She murmurs. She kisses my head and keeps her face pressed there. "I feel like everything."

She should. She should.

* * *

I walk away from everything I ever wanted, from the future I never even dreamed I could have.

Annie kisses me and tells me she loves me. She tells me she'll see me soon.

"Be strong," she says. "I'll be here when you get back."

I don't have to say it to her. I can see it in her eyes that she is the strongest of us all.

I only have time for a handful of sporadic thoughts as the activated holo flashes. Four short flashes, and it will go off, and I'll be out of my misery and so will these mutts.

_1_

I have loved more than I ever thought I could. I have been happier than I ever thought I could. I have lived and enjoyed it, despite it all.

_2_

It was all worth it, in the end. Who would have ever expected it?

_3_

The girl who was always escaping will not be able to escape this heartbreak and she will be far from my reach. But she will surprise them all with her strength, and they will forever speak of the couple who could never manage to free themselves fully, but found a way to escape inside of each other.

_4_

Somewhere out there, a beautiful woman is going to give birth to a beautiful little boy, and together they will help rebuild this world that is going down in flames with me.


End file.
